Discussed in this essay:

The Myths of Liberal Zionism, by Yitzhak Laor. Verso. 192 pages. $22.95.

How great is the God Who allows a poet to be born at the same moment as his nation! Let us praise Him! Let us praise Him with flute and timbrel! Let us praise Him by criticizing Israel!

Yitzhak Laor—Israel’s most celebrated dissident, and perhaps its greatest living poet—was born in 1948 a month before the founding of the Jewish State. The town he grew up in, Pardes Hannah—Hannah’s Orchard, named not after the biblical Hannah, mother to the Prophet Samuel, but after Hannah…